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Europe's Largest IT Company To Ban Internal Email
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, Europe's Largest IT Company, wants a 'zero email' policy to be in place in 18 months, arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful, and that staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week. 'The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool,' says Breton. 'The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.' Instead Breton wants staff at Atos to use chat-type collaborative services inspired by social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter as surveys show that the younger generation have already all but scrapped email, with only 11 per cent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it. For his part Breton hasn't sent a work email in three years. 'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I agree that most emails are useless (starting from those which are sent just FYI, but are still distracting and interrupting the workflow).
However, if there is one thing I learnt by working in a megacorporation, is that _everything_ has to be in writing at some point.
So many times a colleague or supplier will say "sure, we'll do that no problem" and then weeks go by, without anyone remembering.
For accountability, email is still the way to go.
I work IT and my company could not survive without email. All of our orders from customers and orders to vendors go through email. We have to attach PDF and word documents too. How am I going to do that with text messaging? Email is the most useful and important IT function we have.
"Sir, people are using our communication tool for unproductive social activities."
"Quickly, build an internal system which is modelled after even less productive, more overtly social software."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This whole IM thing is no different than a phone call. Some communication requires careful thought and so is best written down so you can think about a response. Email is the perfect medium for such communication. Facebook is a general post to anyone who might read it. When you need a private, considered opinion, email is the way. Or am I now too old to 'get' facebook or twitter? They both seem pointless to me. In fact, moving your employees towards them would seem to be a drain on productivity if nothing else.
This would be the CTO of a company renowned (in the UK at least) for its involvement in a huge number of abortive public sector IT projects. I very much doubt that Breton has much input into those projects though, as Atos is a huge company. He probably does what most executives of his calibre do, and attend pointless senior managment meetings, generally in nice locations with dinner and drink laid on. That's when he isn't schmoozing for more work, a task that generally involves more dinner and drink, all paid for out of the company kitty.
So people are receiving lots of emails, of which 90% are useless, and this guy decides the solution is to switch from emails to 'chat-type' services. So now you've got lots of chat messages, of which 90% are useless. Problem solved?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
When it comes to useful communication, talking is usually one of the most inefficient and ineffective ways to get real work done. Whatever slight advantage might come from the realtime aspect of it is immediately lost several times over due to the lack of any history being retained. This makes it far more difficult to refer back to it later, to share it with others, and to search through large volumes of it.
In most businesses, those people doing the real bulk of the work tend to prefer written communication. It's just a far more efficient way to work. In turn, those who prefer verbal communication are usually those who do the least real work. They're the ones who sit in meetings or phone calls all day "planning" or "discussing strategy" or otherwise not doing anything useful.
I work almost entirely in email. I hate talking on phones. I hate ringing people. I hate being called.
The phone is so intrusive, it's like the person doing the calling has no care about what the person being called is doing, they think they are the most important thing ever and you should be sitting there just waiting for their call. Telephoning somebody, to me, is like walking up and interrupting the other party when they are in a conversation with somebody else.
Email by contrast is fundamentally polite and efficient, you send the message and when it is convenient for the other end, they reply.
The same problems that phones have also apply to other forms of "instant" messaging.
Most people have no trouble working over email, the few who do I generally find either have some disability (dyslexia), or are just plain demanding and really do believe that they are the most important person and can't understand why you won't spend hour upon hour on the phone listening to their inane drivel (and woe betide you should bill them for it).
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The reasons I prefer email for business are:
- it forces people to organize ideas somewhat instead of babbling around.
- it leaves a trail. There's no argument that someone requested X instead of Y for product Z.
- it can be forwarded, shared and printed.
I have clients that insist on using Skype. They spend 30-40 minutes discussing stuff that could be summarized in an one-paragraph email. During all the talk I have to keep notes, then organize the items discussed and make a doc that I send back to the client asking if they're sure this is what they wanted and then share it with my team. Overall I don't save time.
I can't speak for anybody else, but for ME email is still the preferred business communication tool.
This is so sad. It's a symptom of a much greater problem: We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education.
The little Johnys and Janes are barely literate. Composing even the simplest prose (to answer an email or any other written communication) just takes too long for the average person entering the workforce today.
I understand why IM / Skype are preferred, and I do the same with my coworkers, but not every communication needs to be real-time. When email and IM are both available, email becomes a "when you have a moment" queue, while IM is "Right Fucking Now (tm)". If someone sends me an email, I'll quickly scan it, maybe flag it on a to-do list, and deal with it when I'm idle or bored.
My expected response times:
Email: 24hrs
IM: 10 mins
Phone: immediate (duh)
The best way to get me to yell at someone, is to mis-prioritize something. Email me a work order, then call 5 minutes later asking why it hasn't been done: yelling. Call me to post an event on the site that's 3 months away, which details you have yet to finalize: yelling. Text me from McBurgerWay to ask if I want anything: yelling.
All three channels have their pros and cons, and should be used appropriately. To completely shun one or two of them, to me at least, seems incredibly foolish and even ignorant.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Several potential suppliers have lost my business by not doing email. I work in IT and they try to get me to use a fax???
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week.
Man, so how many hours will they spend if they are on Facebook and Twitter trying to accomplish the same thing?
only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful,
10 per cent is an awesomely high signal to noise ratio in Facebook and Twitter.
Exactly. Multi-hour, daily conference calls about why a project is behind schedule are the leading cause for projects to be behind schedule.
It's the asynchronous nature of e-mail that improves my productivity.
Add in the CYA factor of being able to save, and forward old e-mails, and I can't see why anyone would want to move away from e-mail.
Unless they don't want to be held accountable for what they said months ago, or if they prefer to spend all their time in conference calls about work, as opposed to actually doing work...
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
The problem is the culture. The fact that there is a poor signal to noise ratio in employee communications is unlikely to be remedied by simply swapping medium... The garbage will just come through the new channel. The situation will only improve if people begin thinking about what is necessary to communicate, rather than spamming every thought that comes into their mind.
Of course, banning *all* forms of electronic, textual communication might help this... but it doesn't seem (from the summary at least) that this is what's being suggested.
How many 'legal organizations' do you work with, exactly? We have about 600 clients, many in the legal/financial markets. Most have retention policies requiring years of emails to be kept. I believe law requires some financial institutions to archive email for a number of years as well.
"Why do they do this crazy thing?" asks the five minute attention span twitter generation of teens and twixties that have never held a full time job with any more responsibility than making sure that a coffee had extra cream. They do this to cover their asses. One email, a SINGLE email, can make the difference between a multi million dollar lawsuit or a lost account that pays your salary.
Both of which can be trivially faked, but then lots of legal matters hinge on something as ridiculously arbitrary as a signature - a random mark on a piece of paper which is even easier to fake.
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If it's really important, someone will call....
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me? send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote, and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget.. With a call as soon as you hang up i can't go back and replay it. If someone calls me and asks me to do something the first thing i always ask is for them to send me an email or IM with the request.
Also with phone they expect an immediate response, and so i have to interrupt what i am working on to respond to them. and all too often if they leave a voicemail it is just "please call me back" with no detail of what they had wanted and so now i have more wasted time calling them back and half the time they aren't there so i have to leave a voicemail "i called you back, but you weren't there, what was it you wanted?". this would all have been solved by a simple email to begin with!
Actually, it doesn't matter if both parties don't have similar retention policies. My company is going through a goofy process to regenerate and supply some old data to a major bank that we did some back-office processing for. People in my company involved in things 5 years ago SWEAR up and down that they had the OK by the bank in an email to stop the collection of certain data that we'd been doing for the bank that was bought by this major bank way back then, but NO ONE in my company could find the email on our side. No way is the bank going to find it on their side, even if they still had the email (this was like 5+ years ago, so it's probably out of their email & backup retention window for that kind of data).
So... lots of silly work on our side to reprocess and regenerate this data, but I suppose it's cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit and probably having to do it anyways.
An old saying from when I worked at Abbott Laboratories..."if it isn't documented, it didn't happen". Yes, this is a sword that can cut both ways, but usually it inflicts great harm on the wielder of the sword.
And, the paper trail that is email, being stored on centralized servers, and at least in a bigger company, having some degree of isolation of manipulation by end users (OK, they deleted the email from their inbox, but it was sent to them while they were at home during the night, and it was saved on the mail server's backups from that night...), means it's going to stand up in court far more than an IM log stored on a user's computer.
But, it's his company to run, I suppose. Good luck to him.
Texting/IM is just real-time email. The downside being that I must respond on your timetable, not mine, and my time is more valuable than yours - and before you respond to that last bit... Yes it is. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .